Translation

On secret joys of foreign tongues

By Anastasia ⋅ July 10, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Brian Kiteley, who teaches creative writing at Denver University and has written a writing manual called 3 AM Epiphany, has some fascinating notes about the way English speakers relate to the logic and culture manifested in the very syntax and style of foreign languages. Here’s an example:

If conceptual concreteness may be measured by the density with which thought and articulation permeate each other, then Adorno’s style can be characterized by the constant striving to be concrete. It is, however, a concreteness which has no place within the intellectual horizons of English. In English what is concrete is what is immediate, tangible, visible. Whatever the historical causes of this empirical orientation may have been, contemporary English does not tolerate the notion that what is nearest at hand may in fact be most abstract, while that which is invisible, intangible, accessible only to the mind may in fact be more real than reality itself. “Aren’t there enough words for you in English?” Joyce was once asked: “Yes,” he replied, “there are enough, but they aren’t the right ones.”

I am interested in how he uses this information in teaching. I did once explain in a lecture some traditional stylistic guidelines like the recommendation to avoid adverbs, participles, and repetitions to my students in terms of the difference between English and other languages. There are few natural rhymes in English for example, whereas they are plentiful in Italian, French, and Russian. Thus repetitions–even of morphemes like -ly and -ing–can sound jarring to a sensitive ear. For the same reason, rhymes in prose mostly sound childish in English. Latin and Russian are both heavily inflected and can express thoughts in fewer words than English with greater flexibility in word order. Yet in English words like “to,” “the,” and “of” cannot be avoided; the contrast with the polysyllabic monsters some of my students like can give their sentences the appearance of monsters à Frankenstein. What English has on most other languages however is the richness and vastness of its vocabulary and the vigor of the constant tension between its Anglo-Saxon and Latinate words.

Kinney quotes Paul Auster, who said this much better in his introduction to the Random House Book of 20th Century French Poetry:

Although English is in large part derived from French, it still holds fast to its Anglo-Saxon origins. Against the gravity and substantiality to be found in the work of our greatest poets (Milton, say, or Emily Dickinson), which embodies an awareness of the contrast between the thick emphasis of Anglo-Saxon and the nimble conceptuality of French/ Latin—and to play one repeatedly against the other—French poetry almost seems weightless to us, to be composed of ethereal puffs of lyricism and little else. French is necessarily a thinner medium than English. But that does not mean it is weaker. If English writing has staked out as its territory the world of tangibility, of concrete presence, of surface accident, French literary language has largely been a language of essences. Whereas Shakespeare, for example, names more than five hundred flowers in his plays, Racine sticks to the single word “flower.” In all, the French dramatist’s vocabulary consists of roughly fifteen hundred words, while the word count in Shakespeare’s plays runs upward of twenty-five thousand. The contrast, Lytton Strachey noted, is between “comprehension” and “concentration.” “Racine’s great aim,” Strachey wrote, “was to produce, not an extraordinary nor a complex work of art, but a flawless one; he wished to be all matter and no impertinency. His conception of drama was of something swift, inevitable; an action taken at the crisis, with no redundancies however interesting, no complications however suggestive, no irrelevances however beautiful—but plain, intense, vigorous, and splendid with nothing but its own essential force.” More recently, the poet Yves Bonnefoy has described English as a “mirror” and French as a “sphere,” the one Aristotelian in its acceptance of the given, the other Platonic in its readiness to hypothesize “a different reality, a different realm.”

My little lecture seemed to produce a lot of nodding heads in my class last spring, and I’d like to think it was fairly successful. Yet Kiteley seems to be using the question of how English is different from the other languages to discuss not only the (dis)advantages of English, but also to move towards a duscussion of how to infuse our language with some of the foreign tongues’ better traits. He quotes Jameson:

Nowhere is the hostility of the Anglo-American tradition toward the dialectical more apparent…than in the widespread notion that the style of these works [Lukacs, Benjamin, Adorno and Marcuse] is obscure and cumbersome, indigestible, abstract—or, to sum it all up in a convenient catchword, Germanic. It can be admitted that it does not conform to the canons of clear and fluid journalistic writing taught in the schools….What if, in this period of the overproduction of printed matter and the proliferation of methods of quick reading, [these standards] were intended to speed the reader across the page in such a way that he can salute a readymade idea effortlessly in passing, without suspecting that real thought demands a descent into the materiality of language and a consent to time itself in the form of the sentence?

On a lighter note, elsewhere a Japanese major writes a guide to how to study the language:

I don’t care how many anime tapes you’ve watched, how many Japanese girlfriends you’ve had, or books you’ve read, You don’t know Japanese. Not only that, majoring in the godforsaken language is NOT fun or even remotely sensible. Iraqi war prisoners are often forced to major in Japanese. The term “Holocaust” comes from the Latin roots “Holi” and “Causm”, meaning “to major in Japanese”. You get the idea.

And so, sick of seeing so many lambs run eagerly to the slaughter, I have created This Guide to REAL TIPS for Studying Japanese. Or, as is actually the case, NOT studying it.